Building a Wide-area Linux-based Wireless Network, part 2

Captive Portal Options

June 15, 2009

By
Eric Geier

Last month,
we discovered Open-Mesh, an organization
offering open source Wi-Fi mesh hardware and services. We gathered the necessary
hardware and configured the basic settings. Now we'll discover the captive
portal options offered by the Open-Mesh routers, so we can display a disclaimer
or terms of service, or require a payment or account. In this part, we'll also
set up the built-in captive portal. It offers a basic solution that should work
fine for many. Now let's get started!

OpenMesh

Captive Portal Options

You can simply throw out the mesh nodes and start offering wireless Internet,
however, you'll probably want to configure some type of captive portal if it's a
public network. A captive portal prevents users from accessing the Internet
until they either agree to your usage terms or at least view the portal or splash
screen. This lets you show a disclaimer, agreement, or advertisements. Captive
portals can also work in hand with authentication and billing solutions. Then
the captive portal could prompt users to login and/or provide payment before
Internet access is given.

You can either use a third-party service or use the captive portal and bandwidth limiting features
provided by Open-Mesh. For third-party service, Open-Mesh can be manually
configured for compatible RADIUS servers or you can use one of the
pre-configured services. Two of the preconfigured choices is CoovaOM and
WorldSpot.net. They give out their services for
free when you are offering free hotspot access. They charge a small fee when
you're
offering paid hotspot access. CoovaOM is better integrated with Open-Mesh,
however, WorldSpot.net offers a ticketing system.

First we'll fiddle with the captive portal built into Open-Mesh. Then we'll
experiment with CoovaOM since it's provided by
Coova, a premier provider of open-source
and commercial Hotspot solutions. (Remember
Coova? We discovered their open source replacement firmware for routers in a
previous
tutorial.)

Remember, any captive portal or limits you impose applies only to the
public users (SSID #1). Your private network (SSID #2), fortunately, will always
have unrestricted access.